


Heavy Things Won't Fly

by HowlingHooves



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Angst, Bittersweet, Choices, Decisons, Destroy Ending, Emotional, F/M, G&S, Love, Regret, Songfic, the catalyst - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-22
Updated: 2017-01-22
Packaged: 2018-09-19 07:32:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9426254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HowlingHooves/pseuds/HowlingHooves
Summary: In the end, there really isn't a choice. Not for her at least.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is my canon Raquel. In the end of ME3, I've always wondered what would be going through her head and how she would choose between the available options.
> 
> Turns out, for Quel, there really isn't a choice to be made.
> 
> This was written to Nina Gordon's Tonight and the Rest of My Life. It has also been sitting in my files for well over a year, I had just forgotten about it. As a plus, if you all would like, I did make a sort of continuation of it! Let me know, wonderful people, and I can happily add the small blurbs of the aftermath of the Reaper War on. c;

Everyone always had a choice, she liked to say. That was something all her friends had heard at some point or another, and they either resented her for it in that moment or took it to heart. She herself swallowed it down like the bitterest of pills at one point in her life, being told that she had a choice to make.

But here, standing next to the ghostly image of a child that claimed it was the Catalyst, bleeding out and burned and oh so _tired_ , Commander Raquel Addison Shepard knew there was no choice. Even given the options she was, the three paths before her, there was no choice.

She chuckled bitterly, the sound soon becoming a choked sob even as she smiled. Her thoughts moved to Anderson, dead below her somewhere, half in part her fault and the other half the Illusive Man, also now dead. But she couldn't hate him anymore; he had been a decent person once upon a time, that had shone through in the very end of things and she saw he was simply a desperate and lonely man who was blind to the choices he could have made, a man who simply wanted what he had failed to give to someone else.

Thoughts of the Normandy drifted through her mind, of those she had lost while serving on the SR-1 and then the SR-2, friends and loved ones and family.

Joker, EDI, Liara, Chakwas, Cortez, Tali, James, Kaiden, Garrus…

 _Garrus_.

And her smile became a frown, because the only thing she could do would leave him alone. Shepard had no fantasies about living through this, and the only person who she would want to survive for was likely hightailing it out of the vicinity per her order. Despite his want to see this through to the end with her; she couldn't be that selfish, taking him with her..

She took one step forward on shaking legs, gripping her Paladin as tightly as she could despite the burns on her hand and arm. Shepard let her tears slip from her purple blue eyes and down her blood and grime smeared cheeks.

Garrus was at the forefront of her thoughts, memories of their time together spanning from the SR-1 up until just a short time ago when she made him board the Normandy. Of her promise that he would never be alone. She couldn't ever really leave him, but thinking that she sobbed and stumbled.

 _I'll be alone…_ Death she could face, but being stuck somewhere alone, for however long that eternity would last? Her fears of being alone nearly made her look to the other paths.

“No..” She whispered hoarsely to herself; this was for Garrus, for Liara, James, Cortez, Tali, Joker and EDI, and Wrex and the Krogan and so many others. She couldn't just take the easy way now, not if that meant this cycle could happen again in another five years or longer. The Reapers had to be destroyed, because she was willing to sacrifice herself in order to make that happen for everyone else. She could do that for him.

Aiming sloppily at the red beam in front of her, Shepard sobbed through her grimace as she pulled the trigger, over and over until the casing shattered and released the fiery energy. In that instant, thrust backward by the blast, she felt her roller coaster of emotions stop at one she hadn't felt for a long, long while.

 _Peace_.

She felt gravity begin to disappear soon after, metal shrieking and, finally, the free fall that came while suspended just before the actual falling. The moment seemed to drag on forever, but when she finally did fall, the red energy now all but gone from what once was the Citadel, tears hung above her as she smiled, closing her eyes before feeling her conscious mind drift.

Thoughts of the Turian she loved more dearly than anything else sent her off, left her heart feeling just a bit lighter even after having done what she had set out to accomplish years before.

And when the Citadel fell, pieces scattering from London to Florida, Egypt to Cancun, Commander Shepard remained blissfully unaware through it all. The impact shattered bone, broke vessels and skin, sheared through muscle and tendon, bruised organs and dented her already pitiful armor.

When she finally took a breath, rattling and burning as it was, Shepard could see only hazy outlines of her surroundings, could only twitch her fingers to send miniscule bits of rubble crumble below her.

And with another breath, harsh as it was, she made her choice.


End file.
